Problems creating a new user defined languagebrowsing

I created a new user defined language for Denso robots called pacscript. I would say it looks not bad, but I still have some problems. I checked the link from the plugin http://udl20.weebly.com/introduction.html but it was not helpfull.

Thank you for the new link, maybe this can be updated in notepad++. But nevertheless I could solve some problems. But two main things are left:

When I have words with numbers at the end and these are in parentheses, the number is displayed as number. For Example:

IntVariable1 = 42

This will be displayed normal

If (IntVariable1 = 42) Then
End If

Here the 1 is highlighted as number. When I remove the nesting from the Delimiter, then allso the 42 is not highlighted anymore as a number.

The next problem are the comments
Comments can be ’ or Rem
’ is working fine, but with Rem I have the problem, that also “Call RemoveCharacter()” will be a comment. How to define that Rem is only the comment when there is a blank behind?

The next thing what I can not work is the code folding. For easy Function…End Function it is working, but more complex not. I used following settings in the “Folding in code 2 style”

Function TestFunctionWithoutArg As Integer
'dasdsd
End Function
Function TestFunction1() As Integer
Do While (IntCounter < 42)
If (IntCounter <= 0) Then
Exit Loop
End If
IntCounter = IntCounter + 1
Loop
'dasdsd
End Function
Function TestFunction2(ByVal IntInput As Integer, ByRef IntOutput As Integer) As Integer
For IntCounter = 1 To (IntCounter1 + 3) 'the "1" in IntCounter1 should be no number
If (IntCounter = 13) Then
Exit For '"For" should be not used as open folding
End If
Next IntCounter
IntVarNumber1 = 12
IntVarNumber1Plus = 13
If (IntVarNumber1 = 12) Then
'dasdsd
End If
If (IntVarNumber1Plus = 13) Then
'dasdsd
End If
IntNumberBin1 = &B1031001 'should be no number because of the "3" inside
'line comment
Rem Comment
Call Remove '"Remove" should be not displayed as comment
Call Remove() '"Remove" should be not displayed as comment
Select Case IntCounter
Case 1
Case 13
Case Else '"Else" should be not used as open folding
End Select
If (IntCounter = 42) Then
Exit Function '"Function" should be not used as open folding
Else
IntCounter = 47
End If
End Function
Sub TestSub3(ByRef IntOutput As Integer)
If (IO[IntOutput] = On) Then
Reset IO[IntOutput]
Else
Set IO[IntOutput]
Exit Sub '"Sub" should be not used as open folding
End If
End Sub
Sub TestSub1()
'blabla
End Sub
Sub TestSub2
'blabla
End Sub

In December, I put in issue 2713, and ivan-radic and chcg already talked about having Don Ho update the link to the UDL2.1 documentation; I have no idea when or if it will actually happen, however.

Other than that, I don’t think you’ll like my answers. Sorry in advance.

For the “Rem” vs “RemoveCharacter()”, I’ve come across this before (I couldn’t quickly find it in the forum, though I thought it was with “Rem” vs “Remove” or maybe “Remember” – but maybe it was in my own experimenting). As far as I remember, there is nothing that can be done with UDL2.1. If UDL were to add another version of the comment style that required separators (similar to the operators 1 not requiring spaces, but operators 2 requiring spaces), it would fix it; or if UDL were to allow regular expressions for the various entries, it would be an easy fix, Rem(?![a-zA-Z]) or similar.

For the complex folding: because UDL2.1 is doing simple word-matching, rather than allowing full regular expression matching for fold indicators and keywords, there is no way you can disambiguate “Exit For” from "For blah = ", or “Case Else” from “If”/“Else”/“End If”. If it were using full regular expressions, those would be doable.

For the (Variable1 = 2) incorrectly highlighting both the 1 and the 2 as numbers, but Variable1 = 1 working just fine outside of parentheses: that seems more like a bug than a lack of feature. I was able to re-create it with a very simple UDL language: Number styling was set to something obvious (Foreground=white, background=black), Delimiter 1 was set to (/), style: underline, foreground=red, background=white, and nesting=numbers

I filtered the notepad-plus-plus repo issues for UDL, and saw 28 open UDL issues; you could read if any of those mention your problems or not. If not, I’d suggest adding them as separate issues, with a simplified example (don’t show your full UDL definition, just the smallest UDL that shows the exact issue – like I described for the in-parentheses vs no-parentheses re-creation, so there are no external downloads required to understand the issue – though an embedded ![](url://to/img.png) would probably be helpful, like I did). The nested-number-in-delimiter might possibly be a bug fix in UDL2.1, whereas for full regular expressions for the various entries, it’s probably going to be a UDL3 feature request; ivan-radic is non-publically working on UDL3, but no news as to when it might happen.

@PeterJones Thank you for your help.@Claudia-Frank Good idea. I didn’t check this, because I added all the special keywords and preprocessor word already. I added now all the special keywords to the langs.xml and this is working. But I need some more keyword groups and not only “instre1”. I added the the “instre2” and “type1” to “type4”, add them also in the “styler.xml” but it is not working. The keywords are in the list, when I check Settings > “Style Configurator…”. Do you have one more hint?

I’ve tested it and can confirm your findings but currently, I do not understand why it
can’t be done. From your description it sounds that you’ve done what you needed to do
except that vb lexer only support 4 different keyword lists.
The issue seems to be the keyword list as I see that the styles I have defined are
registered with scintilla editor. Unfortunately I cannot see which keywords
are registered. I will try to see if I can figure out what’s going on.

@Claudia Frank Thank you for looking in the source code. Then I decided to stick with my own created UDL even code folding and some others are missing. It feels better to me to have at least the requested keywords are highlighted.